BOSTON MASSACRE: The Full Story Of How Two Deranged Young Men Terrorized An American City

It has been two weeks since two homemade bombs exploded near the
finish line of the Boston Marathon, killing three people and
wounding 260.

In those two weeks, we have learned much about what happened and
why.

We have learned about the innocent victims of the attack, as well
as about the deranged young brothers who allegedly carried it
out.

We have watched a dramatic 24-hour manhunt that paralyzed the
city and ended with one brother dead and the other handcuffed to
a hospital bed.

The story of what happened in
Boston has emerged gradually, with new information appearing
daily. Early inaccurate reports have been revised, and early
mysteries have been resolved. There are still some questions to
answer, but after two weeks, the picture is coming into sharper
focus.

The story below is what we know so far. It is based on eyewitness
statements and photos, press conferences, a criminal complaint,
and the reporting of more than a dozen media organizations,
including this one. (Please see the last page of this story for
specific sources and credits.)

Monday

The Richard Family

On Monday, April 15, 2013, an 8-year-old boy named Martin Richard
went to the Boston Marathon with his family. It was a beautiful
spring day. Around 2:45 p.m. that afternoon, Martin was standing
up on a guardrail on Boylston Street to get a better look at the
marathon runners nearing the finish line.

Remarkably, this picture also shows the backpack containing the
bomb that was about to kill Martin, as well as the man who
allegedly planted it. Briefly known as “Suspect 2,” the man in
the white baseball hat in the background is 19-year-old Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, an American college
student from Cambridge. Dzhokhar has allegedly just placed the
backpack near the guardrail and is walking away.

Like the Richards, Dzhokhar had
arrived at this, his targeted location, at approximately 2:45
p.m. Shortly thereafter, authorities say, he moved to the
guardrail and dropped the backpack onto the ground. After walking
past the Richards and other spectators, Dzhokhar loitered in front
of the Forum restaurant at 755 Boylston Street for about four
minutes, looking occasionally at his cell phone and once
appearing to take a picture with it. Eventually, at 2:49 p.m.,
Dzhokhar lifted the phone to his ear.

A few seconds later, down the street, a bomb exploded.

That bomb was allegedly made and placed by Dzhokhar's 26-year-old
brother, Tamerlan. Like the one in Dzhokhar's
backpack, it was a homemade “improvised explosive device”
— a pressure cooker filled with gunpowder, ball bearings, and
nails.

The bomb was designed to kill and maim people, and it did. It
also created a fireball and blast that could be heard up and down
Boylston Street.

At the sound of the explosion, virtually everyone standing on
Boylston Street near Dzhokhar Tsarnaev turned their heads and
looked down the street in bewilderment and alarm.

But not Dzhokhar.

Dzhokhar remained calm, as though nothing had happened.

After the
explosion, amid the confusion, Dzhokhar rapidly began walking
west, away from the marathon finish line. The backpack he had
placed near the guardrail was still on the ground. Twelve seconds
after the first bomb went off, the homemade pressure-cooker bomb
inside Dzhokhar's pack exploded.

Shrapnel from
the second bomb tore through the Richard family and other people
nearby, literally blowing them apart. The bomb killed 8-year-old
Martin Richard. It tore off his sister Jane's leg. It put his
mother in the hospital with a serious brain injury. It blew off
limbs, ripped gashes in dozens of people, and sprayed blood,
flesh, and bone all over the sidewalk.

The
devastation caused by the bombs turned Boylston Street into a war
zone. The photos of the blasts and the chaotic and horrifying
moments that followed are unforgettable.

Despite the risk that other bombs might explode anywhere at any
time, policemen, race volunteers, doctors, and spectators
immediately descended on the carnage and began helping those who
had been crippled and hurt. Firefighters began searching
frantically for a rumored third bomb. Runners stopped
running to help victims. These and other quick responses saved
several people who might otherwise have bled to death.

A 27-year-old named Jeff Bauman, for example, had both legs blown
off below the knee. A marathon spectator named Carlos Arredondo,
who had lost one of his sons in the Iraq war and the other to
suicide, was attending the marathon to support a runner honoring
his sons. Arredondo tied a cloth tourniquet around one of
Bauman's legs and pinched Bauman's bleeding artery closed on the
other. Moments later, Arredondo, still wearing his cowboy hat,
helped two others wheel Bauman toward a medical tent.

A race
volunteer named E.J. Occhiboi, who was volunteering two blocks
away from the marathon's finish line, saw a medical tent reserved
to treat marathon finishers and sprang into action with the
wounded.

One bystander who'd been rushed into the tent had a deep,
three-inch-wide gash in his leg with a piece of shrapnel sticking
out of it.

“You could just see ... a chunk of his hamstring was gone,”
Occhiboi said.

Up and down Boylston Street, volunteers, runners, firefighters,
policemen, and medical personnel rushed to help the victims of
the bombs. This response was one of the first of many inspiring
moments that would occur in Boston over the next five days.

Over the next several hours, there were frequent rumors and
reports of other bombs. Authorities were briefly worried
that a third bomb had been placed under the grandstand, and
firefighters searched desperately for it. A fire in
the JFK library was initially linked to the bombings. Backpacks
and other belongings abandoned by fleeing spectators, or just
lost in the confusion, had to be searched, for fear that they
contained more bombs.

As word spread of the horror, relatives and friends of runners
and spectators began trying to make contact with their loved
ones, desperate to make sure that everything was OK. The cellular
networks didn't work, however, so many of these communication
attempts failed.

In most cases, this brief panic ended as it did for the man and
woman below — in joy and relief. In many other cases, however, it
didn't.

Facebook

As the immediate horror of the bombings passed, the focus turned
to the victims.

The first confirmed death was 8-year-old Martin Richard.

When Martin's father, Bill Richard, returned to the family's
house in Dorchester Monday night, he
was still wearing hospital scrubs. A neighbor asked if he was
okay. He didn't respond. A friend who had driven
Bill home explained that Martin was the child who had died. The
neighbor said her “heart just fell.”

The Richards
were deeply involved in the Dorchester community, and Martin's
death was felt far beyond the family. On Tuesday, Bill Richard
made his first public statement:

“My dear son
Martin has died from injuries sustained in the attack on Boston.
My wife and daughter are both recovering from serious injuries.
We thank our family and friends, those we know and those we have
never met, for their thoughts and prayers.”

Martin Richard's wide, gap-toothed smile quickly became a
defining image of the tragedy. Mourners left flowers, stuffed
animals, and “Peace” signs in the Richard family's
driveway.

Another photo of Martin also went viral.

In the photo, Richard is holding up a sign he made after learning
of the death of Trayvon Martin.

“No more hurting people,” it reads. “Peace.”

“The outpouring of love and support over the last week has
been tremendous,’’ Bill and Denise Richard would later say after
burying their son. “This has been the most difficult week of our
lives and we appreciate that our friends and family have given us
space to grieve and heal.’’

Krystle
Campbell.Facebook

Krystle Campbell, 29 — who had gone to the marathon with her
friend Karen Rand to watch Rand's boyfriend cross the finish line
— was the second bombing victim to be identified.

A restaurant
manager from Arlington, Krystle made friends easily,
and kept them: She had been a bridesmaid in 17 different
weddings. At her job at Jimmy's Steer House, she oversaw a dining
room staff of 45 servers, and she was known for her ability to
handle difficult customers. Krystle's grandmother
Lillian told
Sports Illustrated that her happiness was so
infectious that “no one could be depressed around
her.”

Krystle
went to the marathon every year. The day of the bombings,
having not heard from her, Krystle's family
went to Massachusetts General Hospital to look for her. To
their great relief, they were told that Krystle was hurt, but
alive. For many hours, doctors occasionally emerged from an
operating room to tell Krystle's parents, William and Patty, how
she was doing. At 2 a.m., the Campbells were finally allowed into
a recovery room to see Krystle. It was there that they discovered
that the patient the doctors had been working to save was not
Krystle, but her friend, Karen Rand, who had lost a leg. Krystle,
the Campbells soon learned, was dead.

Lingzi
LuAP Images

Friends of another young woman, a 23-year-old Boston University
graduate student named Lingzi Lu, had also been searching
frantically for her since the bombs went off.

They began
posting to Facebook and Twitter on Monday afternoon.
Lingzi had gone to the marathon, they said, and now she was
missing. Lingzi's friends
posted pictures of her online and begged people to help find
her. The next morning, having heard nothing, Lingzi's
roommate at BU and other friends went looking for her. They
traveled from hospital to hospital until they reached the Boston
Medical Center, where they learned that doctors were treating an
unidentified Asian woman who was not well enough to be
seen.

Lingzi's
roommate and friends waited for hours at the hospital, only to
learn, as Krystle Campbell's parents had, that the patient being
treated was not Lingzi. And then they learned that Lingzi was
dead.

Lingzi was
from a city in northeastern China called Shenyang. Her friends
described her as “a kind young woman with a passion for music who
hoped to find love in America.” Her teachers described her as
“bubbly” and as an exceptional student. The day before she was
killed, Lingzi learned that she had passed a key part of an exam
required for her degree in statistics.

On the same
day that Lingzi Lu's friends were searching for her, one of the
men who had allegedly killed her, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, returned to
his normal life as a student at the University of Massachusetts
Dartmouth.

In what
might be described as a case study on the banality of
evil, Dzhokhar worked out at the college gym on
Tuesday night. He played FIFA soccer on an Xbox in his dorm room. He smoked pot, which is
something other
students said he frequently did. And he resumed his frequent
postings on Twitter.

twitpic.com

Dzhokhar's first Tweet after the bombings had appeared at 5:04
p.m. on Monday afternoon, only two hours and 20 minutes after the
bombs exploded:

“Ain't
no love in the heart of the city, stay safe people,” it
read.

Later that
evening, Dzhokhar's tweets continued. The user Dzhokhar was
replying to below has since deleted the account, so it's not
clear what Dzhokhar was talking about, but the middle tweet,
especially, is chilling:

Dzhokhar
resumed his tweeting on Tuesday morning. He responded to other
Twitter users, giving one advice to use “Claritin Clear.” He also
provided some commentary about the bombings, deeming one story
“fake.” And he tweeted some lyrics from the rapper Emininem
expressing the feeling that what most normal people talk about is
“gibberish.”

Toward the end
of the day, Dzhokhar also proudly announced that he was “a stress
free kind of guy.”

Dzhokhar
Tsarnaev did not appear to have been actively trying to “blend
in” during the days after the bombings. He just appeared to be
doing what he normally did: Hang out in the dorm. Work out. Go to
class. Play video games. Outwardly, at least, the experience of
allegedly becoming a mass-murderer did not appear to have changed
him.

The behavior of Dzhokhar's brother Tamerlan in the days after the
bombings was less public than Dzhokhar's but perhaps no less
mundane.

Tamerlan, 26, was married to an American woman named Katherine
Russell, and they lived in an apartment in Cambridge. Tamerlan,
neighbors said, often stayed home and took care of his 3-year-old
daughter while his wife worked as a home health aide. Neighbors
described Tamerlan as friendly and outgoing and said he, too,
often played video games.

Wednesday

Finally, on Wednesday afternoon, the media thought it had what
the whole world wanted: A bombing suspect.

Better yet, the suspect had been apprehended and would now be
marched in front of TV cameras for a perp walk.

Shortly after noon, reports began trickling out that authorities
had a suspect in custody. In one of several major media gaffes
during the week, CNN reported
this information, along with the Associated Press
and Boston Globe. The suspect was
being taken to the federal courthouse, some of these reports
said, and media and spectators descended on the place. Then,
minutes later, to the dismay of the CNN newsroom and millions of people around the
world, the reports were retracted.

“Over the past day and a half, there have been a number of
press reports based on information from unofficial sources that
has been inaccurate,” the FBI said. “Since these stories often
have unintended consequences, we ask the media, particularly at
this early stage of the investigation, to exercise caution and
attempt to verify information through appropriate official
channels before reporting.”

Unbeknownst to the media, the
FBI did have suspects by this time — they just didn't yet know
who they were.

Thanks to surveillance cameras
near the scene of the bombings, and information gleaned from one
of the survivors, the FBI was focusing on two men in baseball
hats who were seen leaving backpacks where the bombs
exploded.

Some of the information investigators received came from one of
the men who was nearly killed by the bombs — 27-year-old Jeff
Bauman.

When Bauman woke up from surgery, after losing both of his legs,
he immediately asked for a pen and paper.

The man who looked into Jeff Bauman's eyes had been wearing a
cap, sunglasses, and a black jacket over a hooded sweatshirt. He
had dropped a bag at Jeff Bauman's feet. Two and a half minutes
later, the bomb in the bag had exploded, blowing off both Jeff's
legs below the knees.

Although no one yet knew it, the man who had dropped off
the bag was Tamerlan Tsarnaev.

Alienated, arrogant, and angry.

Later, when the identity of the suspects was released, a
consensus quickly developed that Tamerlan Tsarnaev had been the
driving force behind the bombings. His younger brother Dzhokhar,
most friends and relatives agreed, had likely followed Tamerlan's
lead.

Tamerlan
Tsarnaev had emigrated with his family from Dagestan, Russia, a
decade earlier, when Tamerlan was about 16. Tamerlan's
grandparents had been native Chechens, who had been deported to
Kyrgystan by the Stalin regime. Tamerlan's father, Anzor, was one
of 10 siblings. His wife Zubeidat came from Dagestan, a republic
of Russia. Anzor became a lawyer and worked in the prosecutor's
office in Bishkek, Kyrgystan. He and his wife had four children:
Tamerlan, two daughters named Ailina and Bella, and
Dzhokhar.

The Tsarnaevs
lived near Boston, on the border between Somerville and
Cambridge, in a cramped third floor apartment. Once again, Anzor
worked as a mechanic, often fixing cars on the street for $10 an
hour. Anzor's wife, Zubeidat, became a cosmetologist and gave
facials at a spa. The family received food stamps and welfare
payments. Tamerlan and Dzhokhar both attended Cambridge Rindge
& Latin high school. Tamerlan was said to be quiet and often
skipped class. His passion was boxing.

Tamerlan's father Anzor had been a boxer, and Tamerlan followed
in his footsteps and eventually became one of the best amateur
boxers in the country. He won a New England regional competition
in 2009 and qualified for the National Golden Gloves tournament,
where he lost in the first round. He won the regional competition
again the next year. He was described as
a smooth but “cocky” and “arrogant” fighter, who seemed
disdainful of other competitors.

Tamerlan attended community college for a while, but he
didn't have a steady job. And by 2009, he had developed another
passion: religion.

The Tsarnaev brothers' uncle Ruslan, who lives in Maryland
and would later dominate network television during the all-day
manhunt for Dzhokhar, said that by 2009, Tamerlan had changed and
was increasingly “spewing this radical crap.” Tamerlan
was offended by Muslim immigrants' attempts to “assimilate” into
the United States. He berated members of his local mosque and
Muslim community who weren't as devout as he thought they should
be. In a boxing profile that was widely shared, Tamerlan was
quoted as saying, “I don't have a single American friend. I don't
understand them.”

In 2009, Tamerlan was arrested for domestic abuse after slapping
his girlfriend. In 2011, to his father's dismay, he also quit
boxing. On September 11th of that year, in a case that has yet to
be solved but is now getting renewed scrutiny, one of Tamerlan's
friends, Brendan Mess,
was brutally murdered in Waltham.

Natick Police

Also in 2011, the Russian authorities reportedly taped
a telephone call between one of the Boston suspects and his
mother, Zubeidat, in which the topic of jihad was vaguely
discussed. Zubeidat had joined Tamerlan in his zealous devotion
to radical Islam and had returned to Russia after she and Anzor
had split up.

President Barack Obama started out Thursday promising that the
U.S. would find those responsible for the attacks.

That morning, Obama gave an emotional speechatan interfaith memorial service at the
Cathedral of the Holy Cross in Boston, decrying the “small,
stunted individuals” behind the attacks.

“Yes, we will find you,” Obama said. “And yes, you will
face justice.”

At that time, the FBI had not
publicly revealed if more than one person was behind the attacks.
But what had started out as a promising investigation was
stalling. The FBI had images of the two suspects, but it was
hesitant about going public with them, for fear of tipping off
the suspects and letting them get away. By then, though, the FBI
was also getting nervous that the suspects would strike
again.

On Thursday morning, the FBI briefed members of the Obama Administration and Congress on the
progress of the investigation. That afternoon, when the flow
of promising leads had run dry, the FBI
decided to release pictures of the suspects and enlist the
public's help in identifying them.

FBI

At a news
conference shortly before 5:30 p.m. on Thursday, officials
unveiled grainy pictures of men they labeled “Suspect 1” and
“Suspect 2.”

The pictures
were broadcast on nearly every major television station and
published by nearly every online news organization within
seconds.

The reaction
was immediate.

The release of
the pictures set off a furious chain reaction that over the next
30 hours would lead to another murder, a car-jacking, a sustained
shootout, and a day-long manhunt that mirrored a real-life
episode of the television show “24.”

At 9:04 p.m.
that evening, an acquaintance of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's tweeted a
closeup of one of the FBI's pictures at him, presumably assuming
that the “Suspect 2” in the FBI photos merely looked like
Dzhokhar:

“Lol... Is this you? I didnt know you went to the marathon!!!”

By then, Dzhokhar and Tamerlan had probably long since figured
out that their days of anonymity were over. If they had planned
or prepared for this possibility, however, it certainly didn't
show in their actions that evening.

Dzhokhar would later tell investigators that the idea for the
bombing itself had been spontaneous, which might be why the
brothers didn't even bother to disguise themselves as they
allegedly walked down Boylston Street with their bombs.

And the brothers' actions the night the pictures were released
appeared to be even more spontaneous.

Only one thing left to do: Flee

By mid-evening, the brothers were on the move. They surfaced in
Cambridge.

At about 10:20 p.m., a young police officer at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology was sitting in his campus patrol car at
the end of his eight hour shift. The patrolman, 27-year-old Sean
Collier, was well-known and well-liked on campus. He had become
friends with some MIT students and had gone hiking and skiing
with them. He had also recently been offered his dream job, a
spot on the Somerville police force, and would be taking it that
summer.

That night,
The New York Times reported, an ambulance staffed by students
drove past Collier's parked car. Collier flashed his blue lights
briefly to say hello, and the students in the ambulance responded
with a flash of their red ones.

Shortly thereafter, two men approached Collier's car from behind
and shot him five times, including twice in the head. The
shootings were not provoked. They were not a confrontation. They
were, police later said, “an assassination.”

The motive for the shooting was at first mysterious, but would
later become clearer: The shooters may have wanted Collier's
gun.

After killing Collier, police say, the shooters tried to steal
the gun. But Collier had a triple-lock holster, and they couldn't
figure out how to open it. So, once again, the Tsarnaevs are
alleged to have killed an innocent bystander for nothing.

A few minutes later, the ambulance that had flashed its lights at
Collier just before he was shot was called back to try to save
his life. It was too late. Sean Collier had allegedly become the
fourth person murdered in the Tsarnaevs' crusade.

Just before 11 p.m. that night, about 25 minutes after Collier
was killed, a 26-year-old Chinese entrepreneur named “Danny” was
driving his Mercedes SUV on Brighton Street in Cambridge when he
pulled over to answer a text. Danny had gotten a Masters in
Engineering at Northeastern the year before, and now he worked at
a startup. Initially, it wasn't clear
exactly what had happened to Danny that night, but
a reporter named
Eric Moskowitz of the Boston Globe later interviewed him and got
the full story.

As Danny sat by the side of the road answering the text, a Honda
Civic sedan swerved up behind him. A man jumped out of the car,
approached Danny's Mercedes, and then knocked on the
passenger-side window.

The man was speaking rapidly, but Danny couldn't hear him well,
so he rolled down the window. The man then reached through the
window, unlocked the door, and climbed in. The man demanded money
and pointed a silver handgun at Danny.

The man, authorities allege, was Tamerlan Tsarnaev.

“Don't be stupid,” Tsarnaev said.

Tsarnaev asked Danny if he had followed the recent news.

“Did you hear about the Boston explosion?” Tsarnaev asked. “I did
that. And I just killed a policeman in Cambridge.”

Tsarnaev then removed a magazine from
his gun, showed Danny that he had a bullet in it, and re-inserted
the magazine.

“I am serious,” he said.

Danny had only $45 in cash, which had been stuffed in an armrest,
and a wallet full of credit cards. Learning this, Tsarnaev told
Danny to drive.

As Danny
drove, Tsarnaev told him where to go. Take a right on Fordham
Road. Take a right on Commonwealth. As the Mercedes rolled along,
the Honda that Tsarnaev had jumped out of followed along
behind.

Danny's heart
was racing so fast that he couldn't stay in his lane. Tsarnaev
told him to relax.

They crossed
the Charles River into Watertown. Tsarnaev found Danny's ATM card
in his wallet and demanded the ATM password. Then Tsarnaev
directed Danny to a side street in Watertown and told him to pull
over.

When the SUV
stopped, Tsarnaev got out and ordered Danny to move to the
passenger seat. If Danny didn't comply, Tsarnaev made clear,
Tsarnaev would shoot him. Danny complied.

The Honda had
stopped behind them, and now the driver, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, got
out.

For a few
minutes, the brothers transferred what Danny assumed was
“luggage” from the sedan to the Mercedes. It turned out to be
bombs. Then Tamerlan Tsarnaev climbed into the driver's seat and
Dzhokhar got into the back behind Danny. And the Mercedes pulled
away.

They stopped
at the Watertown Center. Dzhokhar got out and withdrew cash from
an ATM using Danny's card. Sitting alone in the car with
Tamerlan, Danny wondered whether this was his chance to escape.
But all the stores nearby were dark and locked, so there was
nowhere to flee to.

When Dzhokhar
returned, Tamerlan told Danny that they both had guns. Danny
never saw a second gun, however, and despite many early reports
to the contrary, the police never found one.

The brothers
began speaking to each other in a foreign language. Danny caught
one word: “Manhattan.”

Bizarrely,
Tamerlan then asked Danny whether his car could be driven out of
state. Danny didn't understand. “Like New York,” one brother
said.

The car
continued west, toward Waltham. The brothers demanded that Danny
show them how to use the radio. As they flipped through the
stations, they avoided the news, and when they couldn't find
music they liked, they asked Danny whether he had any CDs. Danny
didn't have any CDs, he said — he listened to music on his
iPhone.

In what would
turn out to be a lucky break, the Mercedes' gas tank was almost
empty. Tamerlan pulled up at a gas station, but the pumps were
closed. He turned the car around and headed back toward Boston.
Eventually, Tamerlan returned to the sedan they had left in
Watertown, and the brothers moved some more stuff out of it into
the Mercedes.

This time,
when they started driving again, one of the brothers produced a
CD with music that Danny said sounded like a Middle Eastern call
to prayer.

[It was] a text from his roommate, wondering in Chinese where he
was. Barking at Danny for instructions, Tamerlan used an
English-to-Chinese app to text a clunky reply.

“I am sick. I am sleeping in a friend’s place tonight.”

In a moment, another text, then a call. No one answered. Seconds
later, the phone rang again.

“If you say a single word in Chinese, I will kill you right now,”
Tamerlan said. Danny understood. His roommate’s boyfriend was on
the other end, speaking Mandarin. “I’m sleeping in my friend’s
home tonight,” Danny replied in English. “I have to go.”

“Good boy,” Tamerlan said. “Good job.”

A few minutes
later, Danny finally saw his chance.

The SUV pulled
up at a gas station on Soldiers Field Road. Dzhokhar got out to
fill the tank, planning to pay with one of Danny's credit cards.
A moment later, Dzhokhar rapped on the driver's side window.
“Cash only,” he said to Tamerlan.

Looking down,
Tamerlan counted out $50 of cash and handed it to Dzhokhar.
Dzhokhar headed for the gas station office to pay.

Tamerlan's gun
was in the driver's-side door well. Tamerlan was fiddling with a
GPS. Danny's reflexes took
over:

“I was
thinking I must do two things,” he
told Moskowitz of the Globe. “Unfasten my seat belt and open
the door and jump out as quick as I can. If I didn’t make it, he
would kill me right out, he would kill me right away. I just did
it. I did it very fast, using my left hand and right hand
simultaneously to open the door, unfasten my seat belt, jump out
. . . and go.”

As Danny
bailed out of the car, he heard the startled
Tamerlan yell, “Fuck!” And he felt Tamerlan make a grab at
him.

Danny didn't
look back. He dashed into the street and ran toward the lights of
a Mobil station. Reaching the station, Danny charged inside and
told the clerk to call the police. Then he dashed into a
storeroom. The clerk initially thought Danny was drunk.

“The door opened quickly,” the clerk, Tareq Ahmed,
later told
WHDH. “I thought it was a drunk man because of how he opened
the door. I got up quick and wanted to yell at him and ask him
why he would open the door like this. He fell down right there
and then he said, ‘Please call the police. There are people who
want to kill me. There are people who want me dead. They have
guns and they have a bomb.

“I grabbed the phone and I made sure I was not panicking,” Ahmed
continued. “I swear to God I was making the call and I was
worried that someone may just come in and shoot me. I couldn’t
even look outside. I closed my eyes and I was talking on the
phone expecting death at any minute. ... Just in case someone
outside saw me moving, in case they suspect I’m doing something
wrong inside and they come in. I wanted to make sure everything
looked normal.”

Ahmed dialed 911 and then took the phone to Danny.

Across the street, the Tsarnaev brothers took off.

Because of the murder of Sean Collier earlier in the evening, the
area was full of police. Officers arrived at the Mobil station in
minutes, and Danny told them what had happened. He told them that
the Mercedes could be tracked using a Mercedes satellite system.
He told them that his iPhone was still in the Mercedes and that
it, too, could be tracked.

Danny had been held prisoner by the Tsarnaevs for nearly an hour
and a half. His daring escape had finally given the police the
break they needed. And, given the brothers' apparent intention to
drive to New York, it had possibly saved New York from a
terrorist attack.

By now, it was early Friday morning. The hunt for the Boston
bombing suspects was more than four days old. And, finally, the
Tsarnaevs' luck was about to come to an end.

Friday

After Danny
escaped, the Tsarnaevs returned for a third time to the Honda
sedan they had been driving before they carjacked Danny's
Mercedes. As they drove, the police tracked the SUV using the
Mercedes' GPS system.

At 12:42 a.m.,
a dispatcher announced that the Mercedes was in Watertown, near
89 Dexter Street.

A single Watertown officer,
Joe Reynolds, replied.

“I'm right
behind that vehicle,” he said.

The Sergeant
on duty, John MacLellan, told Reynolds to hang back, not to
engage. Reynolds did not engage.

But suddenly,
the SUV turned a corner and stopped in front of the Honda sedan.
The brothers jumped out.

“They jump out of the car and unload on our police officer,”
Boston police chief
Edward Deveau later told CNN. “They both came out shooting —
shooting guns, handguns. He's under direct fire, very close by.
He has to jam it in reverse and try to get himself a little
distance.”

Reynolds
pulled back from the shooting. Then Sergeant John MacLellan
arrived. As MacLellan drove up the street in a Ford Expedition, a
bullet hit the windshield. Both officers got out of their cars
and began firing back at the brothers.

A third
officer, Tim Menton, was on his way home from his shift when he
heard the radio call. He raced to the intersection of Laurel and
Dexter streets. When he hit Dexter, a bullet blew through his
windshield.

Watertown
Sergeant Jeff Pugliese was also on his way home when he heard the
call. He, too, raced toward the scene. Then two more officers
arrived.

In a clever
maneuver, Sergeant MacLellan put his Expedition in neutral and
let it roll slowly toward the Tsarnaevs with its lights flashing.
He hoped the brothers would think he was still in it and shoot at
it, using up valuable ammunition. Meanwhile, he would be in a
position to get a good shot at them.

Then the
brothers began throwing explosives.

One was
another pressure-cooker bomb, which set off a huge explosion and
blew the lid of the pressure cooker into a nearby car. Two more
bombs exploded. Two more were duds.

Instead of
rushing right into the firefight, Pugliese drove up a side
street. He ran through a backyard, scaled a chain link fence, and
then approached the Tsarnaevs from the side. He got within 12
feet of Tamerlan Tsarnaev and started firing. Tamerlan turned and
fired back.

Pugliese
thinks he hit Tamerlan, wounding him. Then Tamerlan ran out of
ammunition, and threw his gun at Pugliese, hitting him in the
arm.

Out of bullets and hurt, Tamerlan suddenly ran toward the main
group of officers. Pugliese, Reynolds, and MacLellan charged
Tamerlan, tackling him to the ground and then handcuffing him.
Then they heard an engine roar.

Up the street,
Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was behind the wheel of the still-operable
Mercedes. Turning around and accelerating rapidly, Dzhokhar drove
straight at the officers, his brother, and the police
barricade.

As the Mercedes approached, Pugliese, MacLellan, and Reynolds
dove out of the way. Dzhokhar drove right over Tamerlan, dragging
his body about 30 feet. One Watertown resident saw the lights of
the SUV lurch up and down as Dzhokhar hit his brother. Another,
watching from her second-floor window, said Tamerlan was still
moving when the SUV separated from him. Tamerlan was lying on his
belly, she said, trying to lift his head. At 12:48 a.m., Dzhokhar
careened through the two police cars at the end of the street and
drove off into the darkness.

The gunfight had lasted about four minutes. More than 250 shots
had been fired, the vast majority of which had likely come from
the police. The next day, when police searched the scene, they
found only one silver handgun of the brothers' — Tamerlan's. In
another indication of the Tsarnaevs' lack of preparedness, they
also found a BB gun.

A Transit
Authority officer, Richard Donahue, was severely wounded in the
firefight. A
witness told the Globe that police officers had been firing
from behind Donahoe, and it's possible that the bullet that hit
Donahue came from them. (The D.A. is
investigating.) Donahue was hit in the
femoral artery, and very nearly died. Only the desperate efforts
of several police officers to stanch the bleeding, get Donahue
into an ambulance, perform chest compressions, and drive the
ambulance to Mount Auburn hospital saved his life.

After fleeing
the firefight, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev drove the battered SUV about a
half a mile, to the corner of Spruce and Lincoln Streets.

Then he took
off on foot.

Dzhokhar was
wounded — he had what appeared to be shrapnel wounds, perhaps
from the brothers' bombs, on his neck, ear, and thigh — and the
police found blood in the SUV. They also found blood and urine in
a nearby yard.

But for
another 16 hours, that would be all they would find.

According to a
Watertown resident, the police were
only about 45 seconds behind Dzhokhar as he sped away from
the scene. Soon, they were swarming the neighborhood, going house
to house. They set up a command post in the Arsenal mall. They
searched the abandoned SUV. They began analyzing the scene of the
firefight. They drew up a five-sector search grid, with a
20-block perimeter around the SUV. They searched hundreds of
houses. They stripped and handcuffed a man who seemed suspicious
(the famous
“naked man” that many TV viewers and digital sleuths were
convinced was Tamerlan), and then determined that he was a
resident. And they kept searching in vain for Dzhokhar, who had
disappeared into the night.

REUTERS/Jessica Rinaldi

By morning, an estimated 1,000 police officers were roaming the
streets of Watertown, including SWAT teams and the National
Guard. Police were running down every tip that came in, including
many that came from crazy or paranoid people. Residents said the
police searched everywhere, sometimes multiple times, but some
residents also said they didn't do a particularly thorough
searching job.

One resident
near where Dzhokhar was eventually found, for example, showed
police into a barn and had to remind them to suggest that they
search the basement. Another resident said a policeman shone a
flashlight at a person-sized hole in the crawl-space under his
house — but then never bothered to look in it. And no one,
apparently, thought to look in a large covered boat in the
backyard of a house on Franklin Street called “Slip Away
2.”

Meanwhile, the entire city of Boston had been shut down.

Public transportation ceased operating. The Red Sox and Bruins
games were cancelled. Schools were closed. Residents were asked
to stay in their homes.

The Slip Away 2

At 6 p.m. on Friday, after 15 hours of fruitless searching,
Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick told people they could finally
leave their houses. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev had disappeared. It was
time for life to return to normal.

Over on Franklin Street, Watertown resident David Henneberry was
glad to finally be able to go outside.

He had been
looking at his boat, the Slip Away 2, out his windows all day,
and something had been bugging him about it.

Two pads that
he had put under the boat's shrink-wrap cover to stop chaffing
had fallen to the ground. It had been windy, so he didn't think
this was strange, but he wanted to put the pads
back.

Henneberry
went outside and put the pads back. The strap holding the
shrink-wrap down was also loose, but the wind could have done
that, too. So Henneberry tightened the strap and returned to his
house.

But something
was still bugging him.

So he went
back outside to check out the boat again.

This time,
Henneberry got a ladder, and climbed up. He rolled back the
shrink-wrap and looked in the boat. Then he saw blood. A lot of
it.

He didn't
think, “Holy crap, I've found the bomber!”

He thought,
“Did I cut myself last time?”

Then he looked
farther into the boat, behind the engine block. And then he saw
Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.

Henneberry
doesn't know whether he knew the body he saw in his boat was
Tsarnaev's, but he didn't stop to think about it too hard. He
also “didn't ask him if he wanted a cup of coffee.”

Henneberry
doesn't remember climbing back down the ladder or calling
911.

But, soon, the
police were there, and he and his wife were being escorted off
the property.

Massachusetts Police

There were
soon reports and videos of another intense firefight between the
suspect and police on Franklin Street. All of that firing,
however, came from the police. Someone started shooting, a
Superintendent later explained, and then lots of other people
started shooting, and then the Superintendent yelled “Hold your
fire!” By that time, the Slip Away 2 looked like Swiss
cheese.

The police
established another command post nearby and coordinated an
approach on the boat.

Nearly three
hours later, at 8:45 p.m. on Friday evening, five days after he
and his brother had allegedly blown apart men, women, children,
friends, and families near the finish line of Boston marathon,
Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was finally in custody.

The story
draws on the reporting of many journalists and stories published
by other news organizations over the past two weeks. The Boston
Globe, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, CNN,
NBC, and local news sources were particularly
helpful. The stories we drew details from included the
following: